About You: Video Games

Favorite Game of all Time: Grim Fandango
  - There's probably 20 or 30 games that could've gone here, but playing this for the first time in 2002, it was hugely formative for me in terms of games being able to portray a coherent world with a self-contained, complete story and a ton of character and wit. There's some control jank and moon logic puzzles, but they've never interfered with the game any more than being minor annoyances.

Favorite Series: Final Fantasy
  - I've played every FF up through 12 (except 11), and imo they're all good in their own way. FF games are like pizza toppings, everyone's going to have different tastes, but pizza is still pretty rad. FF8 is my favorite pizza topping.

Best Soundtrack: Super Mario RPG
  - Another impossible category, but SMRPG's OST never fails to put a smile on my face :)

Favorite Protagonist: Raz (Psychonauts)
  - I had a lot of runners-up here, but it's fun to play a character with a lot of confidence and humor who takes things in stride. He loses a bit of his edge in the second game, but still has a lot of heart and good instincts.

Favorite Villain: Delita (Final Fantasy Tactics)
  - A commoner who sees the impossibility of survival or happiness under the petty political maneuverings of the ruling class, and stabs and manipulates his way up the ladder to depose them all, becoming the thing he hated in the process -- killing his wife, betraying his sister's memory, and possibly giving Ivalice its best possible outcome despite it all. Is he really haunted by what he's become in the ending, or is it just a passing moment of guilt, quickly buried as he continues his rule as king? As much antihero as villain, but a really fascinating character arc.

Best Story: Disco Elysium
  - A game that is about a lot of things, but to me is primarily about two things:
1. The accelerating tension of living in a world that increasingly cannot provide a future, but is prevented by the people who run it from becoming anything else.
2. The fact that no matter how hopeless things are, no matter how inevitable things seem -- literal, actual miracles can happen.
Also, It probably doesn't sound like it from how heavy that stuff is, but it's also one of the funniest games I've ever played. lol.

Have Not Played But Want To: Tunic
  - I've heard it does interesting language stuff, and the movement and art style look really neat. That's all I know, and I hope to be able to play it soon!

You Love, Everyone Hates: Deus Ex - Mankind Divided
  - As an allegory for racism and apartheid, it's clunky. As a simulation of a city in political and social turmoil, explorable 15 layers deep, with dozens if not hundreds of opportunities to make choices that help vulnerable people survive oppression and death and see how all those stories are connected, it's phenomenal. It's also by far the most cop-critical AAA game I've played, repeatedly identifying them as an occupying force and an instrument of power rather than protection, repeatedly giving you opportunities to witness what they're doing and stand up to them.

You Hate, Everyone Loves: Bioshock Infinite
  - The gameplay is fine. It's a perfectly serviceable on-rails action game. The worldbuilding is impressive, but squandered on a story that first cynically draws an equivalence between a cartoonishly racist sky city and the slaves who revolt against it, then even more cynically reveals those are all just background props in the psychodrama of the main character's quest to hit a big reset button on his life. It's all the didacticism of Bioshock 1, but without having anything to actually say. imo!!!

Best Art Style: The Dig
  - Another impossible category, all my favorite games have incredible art design in different ways, and the variety is the point rather than one of them standing out. The Dig has a weird mishmash of styles owing to its troubled development, but the look of Cocytus, how much detail and beauty they were able to wring out of 320x200 and 256 colors, was a huge inspiration for me as a kid.

Best Ending: Outer Wilds
  - I recommend everyone play Outer Wilds, please ping me if you start streaming it :)

Favorite Boss Fight: Watcher Knights (Hollow Knight)
  - I love how endlessly entertaining this fight is, you're constantly managing the space in the room and having to improvise around the patterns of 2 of these guys at a time. Playing randomizers added so many extra layers to it as well, the fight is adaptable to not having dash or double jump, and different nail arts, spells and charms allow for hundreds of approaches. I wish there was an ascended version of this one. Let me fight 12 of these guys!

Childhood Game: The Secret of Monkey Island
  - This could've been Monkey 1 or 2, but the first game was hugely formative for me. I honestly think it taught me a lot about improvising and lateral thinking, being told I needed a specific item and scouring the whole island for it, until I finally thought to substitute something that was *like* that item, and being astonished when it worked. (Most of) the whole series is amazing, but it's the first two that really resonated with me at a young age, with the third very close to it.

Relaxing Game: Subnautica
  - I love Subnautica, the peaceful alien ocean game where I pick up titanium and play with cute alien fish!

Stressful Game: Subnautica
  - I love Subnautica, the primal terror simulator where I descend into dark water with no landmasses visible, until I start to make out the outline of something very big moving in the distance!

Game You Always Come Back To: Mega Man 5
  - My favorite Mega, even as a kid I could tell it didn't play quite the same as the others I had, so it left an impression as sort of a mystery to me. The same quirks that frustrate a lot of MM players made for an interesting routing puzzle once I started speedrunning it, and I can pop in and out of it endlessly, finding new challenges for it or revisiting old ones. Like with FF, every game in this series is good, and I never get tired of this one.

Guilty Pleasure: Minecraft
  - This probably should be in "Tons of Hours Played", and honestly the only guilty part of it comes from the fact that servers in this game are never finished, just eventually abandoned. I love the feeling of progressively building cities and settlements in this game, and hate the feeling of the inventory bottleneck and glacially slow pace of anything ambitious. MCEdit was a godsend, but it's hard to do that with other people, so projects still get set aside until I get the itch again.

Tons of Hours Played: Final Fantasy Tactics
  - Speaking of glacially slow, it wasn't until watching a lot of FFT Battlegrounds that I realized how long the animations take in this game. I put so many different challenge runs into this game as a kid, scoured Deep Dungeon top to bottom, filled up 2 memory cards with saves. It has its flaws, and (imo) a flabby last chapter, but it's still great fun to return and try and solve it in a new way.